Fortec Motorsport

Dear Friends and Family,

A couple of weeks ago I was able to meet with a few teams from the two championships I have been exploring and determining the viability of me participating in; Formula Renault and Formula Ford. Both of these series offer very valuable learning platforms which would serve as a fantastic place for me to move towards Formula 1.

The first team I visited is one of the top junior formula car teams in Europe Fortec Motorsport. The team is truly outstanding in both performance and size. In total there are 18 drivers for the team competing in five different championships.

When I arrived on the Fortec motorsport premises, which is located in an industrial estate in the British mid-lands, I found not one but two warehouses which house the team and all of the necessary equipment to run these cars. Between the two buildings a fleet of immaculate white transporters which haul the cars to the track were parked, impressive stuff.

After heading in to the front office I was met by the team director and owner Richard Dutton. Richard has been involved in the motorsport scene since for a number of years. I can't recall specifically how many at this moment, but close to as my lifetime, with the exception of a few years he 'escaped' to do real estate. Eddie Jordan personally asked him to return to run a driver he was bringing up through the ranks in the 90's.

One of Dutton's recent accomplishments, aside from championships in nearly every class his team enters, is that he is responsible for bringing along Formula 1's newest winner, Heikki Kovelainen through the junior series ranks. He told me he had been impressed with Kovelainen and his perseveirence even though he didn't have any money for racing, even relating one story where he raced at the karting world finals in Japan and sent his chassis with another teams van and had to carry his engine as carry on luggage his flight.

During my meeting with Dutton he showed me around their facilities and introduced me to the Formula Renault team manager. We had a chance to speak about the details of the program and there are certainly some details! Dutton was quite pleased with my previous racing experience and expressed an interest in running me in a car for the winter championship a set of two rounds which he uses to evaluate drivers for the 2009 championship. In order to run the two race winter championship and do a few days of testing I will need to come up with around 42,000 United States Dollars. While the word motorsport has this funny word 'sport' in it, what it really means is motor business. I am going to be hard on the case of finding the sponsors to help me secure this seat for the winter championship as well as the entire 2009 championship!

Today I am going to be doing some private instructing with a journalist by the name Will Powell and perhaps even the famous photographer Stuart Price from the magazine Autocar, the worlds older automotive publication. Wish you all the best for a great week, i'm going to be busy!!!!

Cheers

Michael